Carol Maier

Reading Mario Satz’s transfictional tribute to Helen Lane: Notes toward a method

Toward the end of his novel El criador de la luciérnagas [The Firefly Breeder], Argentine-born writer Mario Satz includes a thought-provoking tribute. His protagonist Paul Quicksilver meets an entomologist named Helen Lane who shares her name with the translator of Satz’s novel Sol. She figures as both a healer of lacewings and a healer for Quicksilver, prompting the return of his long-lost energy – suggestive of the friendship that Satz and Lane themselves shared. This paper addresses that friendship through a discussion of El criador and another Satz novel in which Lane appears, as well as through personal interviews and Lane’s correspondence. Current research trends stress the promise of macro-analysis, but the relationship between Satz and Lane shows that work at the micro level still has much to teach us.

Keywords: author-translator collaboration, Helen Lane, Mario Satz

Biography

Carol Maier is Professor Emerita of Spanish and Translation Studies (Kent State University). She holds a PhD in Romance Languages and an MA in Spanish. For many years she served as Coordinator of Graduate Studies in Kent’s Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies and Institute for Applied Linguistics. She is the book review editor for TIS: Translation and Interpreting Studies and a member of the advisory board of The Translator, TTR, and the book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation. She is currently working on a translation of Mario Satz’s El criador de luciérnagas and an edited volume in honour of the late Helen Lane.